SciFi elements in "Gravity's Rainbow"?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Without serious doubt there are SciFi elements in Pynchon's work. 
Already in "V" there's the androidity moment not only re V herself, but 
also - see chapter 3. IV - in the case of Bongo-Shaftsbury who is 
called  an "electro-mechanical doll" which he demonstrates immediately: 
"Bongo-Shaftsbury smiled. And  pushed back the sleeve of his coat to 
remove a cufflink. He rolled up the shirt cuff and thrust the naked 
underside of his arm at the girl. Shiny and black, sewn into the flesh, 
was a miniature electric switch. (...) Thin silver wires ran from its 
terminals up the arm, disappearing under the sleeve. 'You see, Mildred. 
These wires run into my brain. When the switch is closed like this I act 
the way I do now. When is is thrown the other---'." In Pynchon's later 
novels we have, for example, the Godzilla footprint, the hollow earth 
stuff and several refs to extraterrestrial aliens. But what interests me 
today is the question you read in the subject line. Some days ago I 
finished "The Novels of Philip K. Dick"  [1984] by Kim Stanley Robinson. 
In the last chapter Robinson discusses the distinction of realism & 
SciFi and puts forth the thesis that this distinction is not a strict 
one anymore. His example - in the translation it's pp. 261-262 -   is 
Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow". Well, I wish he would have gone a little 
more into the details instead of giving the reader his summation. But 
since it's like this, I'll just pass on Robinson's points and am going 
to add a comment on the 'alternate history novel' argument. The SciFi 
elements Robinson sees in "Gravity' Rainbow" are the following: a) 
Speculation on the basis of technological progress; b) Radical breaks in 
the text which lead into phantastickal passages; c) A view on 
world-history based on conspiracy-theories, which - according to 
Robinson - transforms the text into an alternate history novel. The 
textual proof Robinson gives for that thesis is the V2 with Gottfried 
(btw, Gottfried is also 'God got fried', no?!) inside that gets launched 
on GR's final pages. Well, first of all, there actually was a Nazi space 
rocket with a boy inside, launched in order to fly to the moon in the 
spring of 1945. (When this more recent research result entered the media 
some years ago I posted some details plus a newspaper source here under 
the title 'Rainbow Files: Fly me to the moon'). Like other scientific 
projects - yes, the one on nuclear technology too ... - the people into 
space travel tested the shit out of their stuff during the last months 
of WWII before all the research facilities fell into the enemy's hand. 
The boy in the rocket didn't reach the moon and died. Yes, Robinson 
couldn't know about this detail of history in the early 1980s. But in 
the case of Pynchon, who also seems to have had access to other details 
of the history of WWII air technology not available for the general 
public at the time,  I'm not so sure. Which brings me back to the 
question whether "Gravity's Rainbow" does really contain SciFi elements. 
Personally I think that Robinson's first two points (see 'a' and 'b') 
are basically correct but not sufficient to actually speak of Pynchon 
bringing "several Science Fiction agreements" into use. You may differ 
on this (anyone?). And the third argument (see 'c'), apart from the fact 
that Pynchon did not really invent the boy in the Nazi rocket, is not a 
solid one, imo. A real alternate history novel needs a virtually real 
counter-history! Like Napoleon having successfully conquered the world 
(see Louis Geoffroy: Napoléon et la conquête du monde), or like the 
Southerners having won the Civil War (Ward Moore: Bring the Jubilee), or 
like Lenin not having been let through to Russia by train and thus 
having started the communist world-revolution in Switzerland which then 
leads to a completely different run of history in the 20. and 21. 
century (Christian Kracht: Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im 
Schatten), or like the axis-powers having won WWII (Philip K. Dick: The 
Man in the High Castle). Nothing of that kind in "Gravity's Rainbow". 
There is no plausible alternate history in the book. It's just a special 
point of view. Weissmann/Blicero is - more or less - Wernher von Braun. 
He came into the USA with the 'Operation Paperclip' which is not 
Pynchon's invention but took place for real. Pynchon used this as a 
real-world-metonymy to deal efficiently with totalitarian tendencies 
inside  US-society during the times of the Nixon administration. But an 
alternate history? How that?! Weissmann and Gottfried hide on some Idaho 
potato-field for a quarter of a century and then fire the rocket to Los 
Angeles? Or, as the text seems to suggest, the rocket got launched 
already in 1945 and then flies around the earth for twenty-five years 
before it descends? Come on! This superficial meaning is just there to 
sew the novel's parts 3 and 4 together; it's not a serious suggestion of 
an alternate history. And I actually think that "Gravity's Rainbow" is - 
next only, in this regard, to "The Crying of Lot 49" - not as SciFiesque 
as "V" or the later books after the break. Please do disagree!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaLLxPtmyPI

"Schlüssel auf SCHIESSEN," orders Blicero.